Irish Examine view: End of the party for Conservatives?

Ireland’s best hopes of progress may rely on a Labour victory at a general election

Liz Truss who resigned on Thursday after only 44 days in the job. Picture: Kirsty O'Connor/PA 

All the column centimetres of coverage of the high jinks in the British parliament — it ran to well over a metre in Friday's Irish newspapers — shows that we have some anxiety about what is happening, or that it’s a welcome distraction with comic sub-plots worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan. Or both.

But amid all the schadenfreude and lofty superiority, an essential point has been missed. We may be witnessing something historically epic in British politics — the collapse of the Conservative Party and its splintering into mutually incompatible components for many years to come.